Most public blockchains are following in the footsteps of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, but some projects are taking a different path. Dusk Foundation has chosen a more difficult route — building its own virtual machine, Piecrust, from scratch.

This is not just pure technical stubbornness. There is a clear logic behind it: the current EVM is well-designed, but it is fundamentally built for handling simple transfers and basic DeFi. Running complex zero-knowledge proof computations on it? That’s like using a calculator to do quantum physics calculations — it can barely work, and the efficiency is ridiculously low.

Real privacy transactions and on-chain compliance checks are not just technical show-offs. Business-level concurrency and millisecond response times — these are hard metrics. Existing virtual machine architectures simply cannot handle them.

That’s where Piecrust is unique. It is the world’s first virtual machine optimized specifically for zero-knowledge proofs, based on the WASM architecture. What does this mean?

On traditional privacy public chains, generating and verifying a zero-knowledge proof takes several seconds, sometimes even minutes. That’s completely infeasible for financial transactions. Piecrust optimizes memory management and opcode execution to reduce this process to milliseconds.

The result is: executing a complex transaction on the Dusk network with privacy protection and compliance review feels no different from doing so on a centralized exchange. This is the kind of leap that virtual machine technology should make in its next generation.